Global Tech Giants & Big Oil have Joined Forces to End Local Democracy

While conservatives worry about "globalists" the richest globalists in the world are convincing them to vote for politicians who won't rein them in on taxes, fraud, and misinformation

On April 29, 1938, FDR delivered this speech - which defines fascism in an important way.

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

Both lessons hit home.”

I just read this paragraph by Ann Pettifor, about how Democrats should exploit now Vice President, J. D. Vance, who became famous writing a memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” but is backed by some of the most politically extreme billionaires, Peter Thiel.

Pettifor cites Edward Luce, writing in the Financial Times -

It would be a negligent Democratic campaign that did not exploit the tension between Vance’s blue-collar roots, which are genuine, and his plutocratic sponsors.

The problem with Luce’s typically establishment analysis is this: there is no tension twixt Vance’s blue-collar roots and the billionaires.

Like wealthy elites that have always backed totalitarianism, the reasoning behind the oligarchy’s support for Trump is entirely rational.

Plutocrats prefer to do business in the globalised sphere, beyond the reach of regulatory democracy, and want elected governments to get out of their way - permanently.

If it takes a fascist to achieve that goal, so be it.

We are undoubtedly at an “inflection point” in history where things cannot continue as they have been going - and there is pushback against it, because the economy isn’t workint.

It’s clear that social media and its owners have the capacity to determine the outcomes of elections. Facebook works with political campaigns to create political targeting, and it has been used to target individuals with misinformation.

The difference in the past is that we would tend to think of Facebook, X/Twitter/ Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and other social media as being what their owners call them - “platforms,” which suggests that they are basically offering a giant electronic bulletin board that other people post on. As a consequence, people play whack-a-mole or focus on users, but not on the owners.

The fact is that both Elon Musk, as owner of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta, as well as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Washington Post, have the capacity to choose what stories we read and what stories we do not.

These companies run on private surveillance. People’s entire lives are on social media, and they gather information on you with every click, like, share.

So what has been created is an Orwellian nightmare of total surveillance, combined with a near-total ability to control the message. They can, and do suppress information they don’t want shared. That happened during the election, when a national security journalist, Ken Klippenstein, uploaded a link to a leaked file on J.D. Vance. Elon Musk personally suspended his account, then personally re-instated it.

That should tell you the level of involvement social media owners are putting into “curating” the news. It is not algorithmic, and the insistence of “free speech absolutism” that ignores that freedom of speech does not include lies, fraud, criminal conspiracy, and various other measures punishable by law, is quite deliberate. It has allowed for the far-right to organize and spread their message.

In his book “Mindfu*k” Chris Wylie wrote as a whistleblower about how the company Cambridge Analytica worked with Facebook and the Trump campaign to target voters to the postal code with messages. There were fake news websites set up, from which news could be shared.

It’s important to note, these kinds of underhanded campaign tricks have always existed, but technology has given campaigns astonishing powers of communication and manipulation that do an end run around all the usual guardrails.

Their focus is on on discrediting everyone but themselves with constant blistering attacks. These messages can be boosted with thousands of fake followers - either bots, or human beings being paid a few pennies.

Totalitarianism is the union of elites & the mob

Hannah Arendt wrote. “'Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”

What is happening is a consequence of extreme inequality and concentration of wealth, where plutocrats have the resources to blame everyone but themselves.

The bitter irony is that these elites - the oil industry and tech moguls - are the greatest beneficiaries of global financialization. These globalists are appealing to people who have been hurt by globalization, with the promise of change.

In Canada, this is happening with the oil industry and Meta (Facebook) teaming up to fund propaganda that is pro-oil and blames everything on Canada’s carbon tax. They fund think tanks and outlets like The Hub Canada in order to push out this messaging in a “credible” fashion, but also support outlets that exist solely to criticize the ruling party.

We should not underestimate the goals of these individuals, especially Peter Thiel, who is an extreme libertarian who has proposed that plutocrats be “seasteaders” and live on tax free islands.

What they imagine, and have spelled out, is a “dark enlightenment” - a return to some quasi-medieval rule where plutocrats and oligarchs have free hand.

There is a real push to dismantle democracy even further, I mean the ability of a country to govern itself and enforce laws and regulations.

There is a saying, that every safety regulation is written in blood, because they are always and only passed after someone has died.

That is the history of law, and democracy, and progress. We have to come up with laws after a disaster has occurred, and one of the defining features of human technology is that we are capable of creating more and more powerful tools.

When, in Canada, Pierre Poilievre talks vaguely about making Canada “the freest nation on earth” he is defining freedom as freedom for plutocrats, oil companies and big tech to extract money from Canadian communities without having to pay taxes, follow laws, while they take all the benefits and leave the communities with the costs. This is not “trade” - it is purely extractive, and it is extractive on a global scale.

The tech companies have collapsed “legacy media” which at least operated on the basis that they were legally liable for what they communicated.

Tech companies are not bound that way - which is why they must be, and there is no global government that is going to do this. It is only local national governments who can do this, and as a matter of sovereignty, they should be able to enforce the law and regulations on entities operating on their territory.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the goal of libertarians - and Trump’s advisor, Steve Bannon.

This was in 2016:

“Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too,” replied Bannon. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

From the evidence of Trump’s extraordinary campaign and first two weeks in the White House, Bannon has an assortment of Leninist political tactics that could have come from the Bolshevik leader’s playbook.

Two days after Lenin seized power in Russia almost exactly a century ago, he began an assault on the press – and his successors in the USSR did not let up for the next 70 years. In the few months between the overthrow of the tsar and Lenin taking power, a relatively free press had sprung up, almost all of it vigorously opposed to Lenin, who was written off as a dangerous demagogue. When his Bolshevik party mounted a successful coup and Lenin made himself, in effect, dictator of Russia, one of his first acts was to censor the press, which he called “a weapon no less dangerous than bombs or guns aimed at us … Why should we place it in our enemies’ hands?”

Three days after Donald Trump’s inauguration Bannon told the New York Times: “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen … I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They do not understand this country.”

As I just wrote, what drove voters rightward was economic insecurity, and it is not just inflation. It is inflation and that people are mired in debt from which they cannot escape. They are drowing, or “underwater.”

People are suffering and they are voting for change, and unless the change is offered by a party that is committed to democracy and the rule of law, they will vote for a party that does not.

It has to be said, again - that the factor of oil and gas prices was incredibly important in generating the inflation that triggered interest rate hikes in the first place.

This inflation was caused by a deliberate choice - U.S. producers working in concert with OPEC to keep the price of oil high and production low. The massive profits were not reinvested in new jobs or production. They all went to shareholders and bondholders, and it was responsible for more than 25% of all the U.S. inflation in 2021, and a similar amount in Canada.

Central Banks’ reaction to go hard against inflation by hiking interest rates may be one of the worst economic, social and political blunders in history, because it ignored the underlying crisis levels of private debt - mortgages.

HOW TO FIGHT IT?

The first step in dealing with a problem is recognizing it. It’s important to understand what is actually happening, and who is responsible.

In the aftermath of the U.S. election, there is too much focus on the demographics of who voted, while ignoring the people who are pulling the strings. In the U.S., there are challenges since they have now essentially seized the levers of power. The question is what they do with them.

First, we do have to recognize and expose this. Everyone needs to recognize what is at stake. The intention is to strip the state of its power of enforcement, which amounts to stripping people of their capacity to protect themselves, which is all-important when you are dealing with individuals and industries whose belief is that they should not be subject to the law - any law.

So, we need to expose what’s going on. In today’s media environment, that is an enormous challenge. The Government of Canada brought in a law requiring Facebook to pay for Canadian news links shared on their site. Facebook responded by blocking all news in Canada, a ban which continues - while misinformation and far-right groups proliferate.

I think there is a point when we have to ask whether these social media networks are really any different than Russia Today, and even what their benefit is, because they have largely destroyed industries where people gathered and shared information for public awareness (surely, not flawless) but has been replaced with social media that has all the editorial judgment of a gas station toilet, except every stall has graffiti curated to brainwash you.

One way of putting is, is if companies continually refuse to operate by the laws of a given country, why are they allowed to?

The other, much more important - and challenging - part of it, is that while symbolism and brainwashing and propaganda is all a concern, one of the reasons it lands and is felt as true or effective is that people are miserable or suffering, and it provides people with an explanation and a scapegoat. That provides relief, and attacking the scapegoat gives purpose and a sense of moral superiority, and control. This is the real opiate of the masses. It is the intoxication of something approaching “war fever.”

The focus in all of this is “how do we change people’s minds or attitudes” about race, gender, and so on, because no one wants to talk about - or believes - that the disempowerment that comes with being in economic distress is something that dominates people’s waking hours for every minute of the day.

Not being able to support yourself or your family. Not being able to put food on the table. Not being able to afford a safe home. These are all fundamental realities and if we set aside the tribalization, and demographic divisions, and opinions, and focus instead on the fundamental economic needs of individuals, that is what will change.

I have ancestors from Northern Ireland, where “the troubles” lasted 30 years and ended up killing 3,000 people in a tiny country. One of the factors that reduced violence was putting people to work in jobs with dignity and good pay, and to do so on a basis that is not hyper-focused on demographics.

For example, while we often recognize that wages are systematically lower for women and people of colour compared to men, we do not recognize that men’s wages have generally stalled out, and in some cases in the last years were as low as they were in the 1990s, 1970s and even 1960s.

Their goal is to replace government with themselves. They will be the financial system. They will be the news system. They will be government. But you will not have a say in it - and you, in your community and your country, will lose what remaining sovereignty you had.

This matters for everyone.

We need a New Deal. A real New Deal where, as FDR said, “we are going to be a bit radical for a generation,” and that meant taming the excesses of the market and especially prosecuting rampant fraud and rip-offs.

It also has to be said - this is something the “market” will not do by itself. They want just the opposite. In fact, this is exactly why global mega-companies are seeking to undermine democracy. That especially includes META and Twitter (X), and even Instagram and their owners, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk.

The irony of the tech/oil alignment with anti-democracy movement is that it shows that these billionaires and oligarchs depend on government for their fortunes.

The way to peel people away from these movements is to make their lives better.

Right now, it’s the private economy that is collapsing, and governments like Canada, the UK, Germany and Europe all have vast capacity to address their challenges, but it requires a shift in economics.

When Trump was elected, the old economic order died, but we do not have to submit to the economic and moral nihilism emanating from the U.S. We have an opportunity - and some little time - to act.

In Canada, the UK and Europe, we need to ignore the economic “experts” who can’t see a bad economy when they are dealing with one, and listen to experts who can turn things around.

What is required is the opposite of austerity. In combination with providing people with the opportunity to restructure their debts, we need to run “high-pressure” economies and aim for full employment, so we are pushing “good money” into the economy and replacing the “bad” money.

We need to recognize the economic harm of the pandemic, inflation and debt, and work immediately to find ways to address it. We do not have to rebuild the same stuff.

In Canada, the creation of a federal job guarantee which would pay people to work would create jobs as well as preserving incomes. The limit in the economy is human and resource capacity, not the economy.

The other is providing access to capital for entrepreneurs in the form of equity, which could be done through the Business Development Bank of Canada. This allows for the new creation of private wealth and jobs in local communities.

Third would be to do this all as part of a broaded Industrial Plan aimed at increasing competition and the development of Canadian-owned businesses.

Finally - we need to recognize that the corner-cutting and erosion of standards that is part of today’s horrible politics is a form of corruption, especially moral corruption.

Corruption and cronyism are integral parts of totalitarianism, both left and right, because they are fundamentally collective systems, in which the rights of the individual will always be forfeit to the collective - and the leader.

In order to preserve democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law, the question is NOT how to crush all opponents. We need to encourage people to join the cause by offering them a positive path out that directly benefits them.

The key to defending against extremism is to ensure that people have financial control over their own lives. That is achievable.

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